Here is a set of cards that you can have up your sleeve while
running a
junior chess club. Sometimes you have a spare player -- and
sometimes players get a bit bored playing the
same
old faces each week #8211; so here are some ways to mix things up.

There were three issues
raised at the start of the summer that I haven't dealt with yet, and
thought I'd offer some reflection. It turned out that the people
who wanted to work on these issues aren't around at the moment, so I
might come back to these!

Making practice (at club and at
home) really helpful
in terms
of improvement
That would be a good thing to solve! Well, in many ways I've
tried to promote and model this over the last few years, so I will be
brief here.

We're used to doing puzzles which might be mate-in-one (Level I),
mate-in-two (Level II) and so on. Someone asked on Friday, what's
the highest level you can get? Well, I have heard of a 1220-move
monster by Babson, but that has some peculiar conditions.

The most moves in a forced-mate problem with no conditions is this
one, from Otto Blathy, who published a whole book of such
monsters.